Does anyone play Doom music through an external synth?

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With any source port that can play through an arbitrary OS MIDI port (e.g. zdoom), it is possible to select "USB Audio Device" as your target and connect that USB-MIDI adapter to an external synth.

But does anyone really do this?

I've been trying it out for the last couple of days. Occasionally you hear a gap of up to a quarter of a second just when the song loops, because the track includes hundreds of setup messages (program change, volume, reverb ett) at the start of the track. These messages can be sent almost instantly to an internal (or software) synth, but they take some time to send over the wire, resulting in a gap in the output.

I'm trying to figure out if it's worth writing some code to mitigate this effect.

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Any USB/Firewire audio/midi interface should do the trick. So long as the synth is a rompler or workstation with multitimberal mode and accepts appropriate program change messages. Unless of course you have 16 synths daisy chained together with the global MIDI channel set accordingly, but that's just excessive ;)

The Korg Triton's GM set worked fine, as well as the Korg X5's RAM/GM library. It always seemed like too much work for the end result though.

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With any source port that can play through an arbitrary OS MIDI port (e.g. zdoom), it is possible to select "USB Audio Device" as your target and connect that USB-MIDI adapter to an external synth.

But does anyone really do this?

I've been trying it out for the last couple of days. Occasionally you hear a gap of up to a quarter of a second just when the song loops, because the track includes hundreds of setup messages (program change, volume, reverb ett) at the start of the track. These messages can be sent almost instantly to an internal (or software) synth, but they take some time to send over the wire, resulting in a gap in the output.

I'm trying to figure out if it's worth writing some code to mitigate this effect.

Hmm. Standard midi interface is 31250baud, 8N2. That's 3125 bytes/s. If that is the source of your problem, then that sounds like some pretty long init areas. I'd like to see one of these midi files.